


Rubber Coated Wires

by Colerate



Category: Fullmetal Alchemist - All Media Types
Genre: Alternate Universe - Science Fiction, Android!Alphonse Elric, Androids, Cyborgs, Dubious Science, Gen, The Singularity, cyborg!Edward Elric, i played hacknet and got a C in computer science I'm sorry in advance
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2020-08-11
Updated: 2020-08-11
Packaged: 2021-03-06 03:29:06
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 12,177
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/25842850
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Colerate/pseuds/Colerate
Summary: For the FMA Bing Bang 2020A sci-fi retelling of FMA. In which Alchemists are known as Manipulators and work with electricity, it's the future but the military is still corrupt and the singularity hit about 400 years ago - closely followed by the android revolution.But that was all a long time ago. Androids are taboo, cyborgs are looked down upon, so of course, Edward had to go ahead and turn his brother into the former and himself into the latter in order to save their lives from their own mistakes.
Comments: 2
Kudos: 7
Collections: FMA Big Bang 2020





	Rubber Coated Wires

**Author's Note:**

> This first chapter is very close to canon but it goes careening off after that.
> 
> We had a small delay and messaged mods but didn't get a reply so I assume this is alright?? I mean, it's out! Hope that's okay.
> 
> Anyway, enjoy!! I might come back to it in the future an revamp it because it is very much a splurge of my conscious but I think it's alright.

Male cable connector slots into the female cable connector. Red plug slots into the red socket. Wires loop and stretch with the stress of the components. All that is left to do is to turn on the power.

“Ready, Al?” Edwards asked his brother, not looking away from the switch. Thick black wires lead away from the lever and disappear into the vessel’s skull. Five minutes should be enough to charge the vessel and bring her back to life.

“... Are you sure about this, Ed? This is... really illegal,” Al responded and Ed turned away from the lever to give him a determined stare, hands not wavering where they clamped tightly onto the handle of the lever. Al was crouched on the other side of the room, his hands hovering over an identical lever.

“We can’t back out now, not after all of this!” He gestured grandly about the room, freeing one hand to do so. Their dad’s study had been transformed into a makeshift laboratory, unearthing the true purposes of the room that had been buried underneath his collection of junk. Given that the set up was perfect for their plans after some tweaking and that the two suits of armour had been revealed to be military-grade old age androids upon closer inspection, it was hard to believe that whoever had owned the house before them had been tinkering with the same forces as they were.

“Yeah, you’re right,” Al conceded, a quiet sense of resolve about him, and gripped onto his lever with newfound strength. “Ready when you are, brother.”

Grinning, Ed began the countdown, “Three…”

“Two…” Al added.

“One…”

“Go!” They both shouted in unison and slammed the levers down in unison.

For a moment, nothing happened and Ed began to fear that something had gone wrong. But then the telltale crackle of electricity sprung into the air, starting small and growing louder until it was in uproar, following the blue bolts that jumped from the thick cables at the joints. The darkness of the study was pushed aside by bright blinding light in erratic intervals, beating to an inorganic rhythm that they couldn't hope to decipher.

Seated but slumped like a doll with no support, the vessel jolted as the first spritz of energy reached its batteries. Their tech was old, what original components they had engineered were drawn from old age designs. Soon, it would rise. Soon, it would not be it, it would be she.

The full battery icon blipped. And it screamed.

It screamed of bolts, of energy, of lightning crashing down, of the frying of circuits, the too-bright burning of bulbs, flames of too-hot processors. All of it at once in unison as its joints spasmed, it’s jaw mechanism unlocking and leaving it gaping in a parody of human agony.

All of this, all at once, ended at once. Like a dying star that barely had a chance to shine, the cacophony centred on itself and the energy curled up close to its core. The briefest moment of silence held fast onto the room and pushed away just as hard. Too fast for his eyes to track from start to end, the world simply went black and then white.

When Edward could see again, it was wrong. He felt a buzzing deep inside of him, in the marrow of his bones. He was pressed against the back wall and he knew his arm was outstretched although he couldn’t see it. What he could see was the static that clouded his vision and slowly resolved itself into the same buzzing that he felt inside of himself, just flickering around the edges of the mechanical bomb site ahead of him.

“Al?” He croaked and made a move to crawl forwards, not trusting in his legs’ ability to support him. But he made hard contact with the blackened ground, his chin connecting with the charred floor with a resounding crack. He’d moved forward with his right arm. It was the same colour as the floor. It had collapsed. “AL!”

“Brother…?” Al’s voice returned, weak and fuzzy. Ed snapped his head in its direction and the visual buzz returned, flowing in cycles throughout his brother’s limp body, but the cycle was filled with holes and little tributaries, syphoning the energy away.

Heedless of his ruined arm, he dragged himself to Al and looked over his body. It didn’t look like Alphonse. It looked like his arm. Unlike his arm, Alphonse was alive, Edward could see it in the energy that buzzed ever so faintly between his brain and slowing heart. 

“... Ed?” Alphonse wheezed and Edward shook himself from his shocked trance. Al was dying. He wasn’t going to let that happen.

The explosion had wrecked half of the study but the study was built for this, the damage had been localised. Ed and Al’s purposes hadn’t been able to fit the safety perimeter, they hadn’t had the resources, cables weren’t long enough, computers too heavy. So many excuses were sat on the base of his tongue, ready to roll down the slope and leave his lips at a moment's notice. But there was no one to cry to here.

The explosion had wreaked the half of the study that contained their tech and it hadn’t touched the old tech they had shoved aside where necessary. Pre-revolution stuff, from before androids had become taboo and cyborgs had been spat upon. Two hulking armoured revolution age androids stood on the left wall, they just needed to be hooked up to the old computers and they’d be serviceable.

So he did that. Mindful of the fading buzz of his brother’s- his brother’s, his network? Electric signals relaying from heart to head to spine, his nervous system, his _network_ \- he dragged him one-handedly over to the computer and willed the rising buzzing around his right arm to _shut up_ and powered it up.

He expected it to scream, to lash out just like theirs had. But, instead, a little vintage loading screen bloomed to life on the large flat screen accompanied by a number of little lights that blipped along the box where he understood the components of the device to be held. A fan thrummed to life, so strange, he thought deliriously, and the screen loaded.

There were two connections. One for the output, Computer-Android. Another for the input. Source-Computer. The source would normally have been whatever the AI has been stored on. But he didn’t have an AI. He had a human brain.

It was insane. Worse than creating an android from scrap. But he could see the network inside of Al’s brain, the computer for what it was, and he just knew he could guide it to where it needed to be. Translate it. Transfer it. Give it a new home.

The little loading bar appeared again on the screen, so quaint and old. He could see the last vestiges of the buzz leave Alphonse and fade out and Edward’s panic rose in tandem like a negative feedback loop. But the millions, billions, trillions, the innumerable ones and zeros that inhabited the android were a true match. And the great hulking military android thrummed loud with them as the loading bar reached its completion, fans whirring hard within its metal chest and lights flickering on.

Edward’s own buzzing, the buzz he could hear within himself, was growing quieter. As was the world around him, fading at the edges of his vision. He smiled without happiness, more grimacing at the horrors he had accomplished and watched as the lights turned on behind the android’s - Alphone’s - eye openings. Red-white flames, designed to intimidate.

And then his smile dropped completely, replaced with an instance of pain as Alphonse came to life, immediately lost his footing in such a massive body, and came crashing down on Edward’s outstretched leg.

He didn’t remember anything after that.

* * *

The buzzing came to him before any of his other senses. First, the buzz inside his bones - no, it wasn’t his bones, it was his _nervous system_ \- and then the buzz that was embedded in his surroundings. Electricity, he realised. He could feel-hear-see-smell-taste the electricity that ran through the many wires nearby and he could just about sense something more in everything else, something further and harder to reach. Something to address when the rest of him wasn’t so numb and tired and unfeeling.

Slowly, the rest of the world revealed itself to him, and he cracked open his eyes to the familiar white ceiling of Granny’s patient room. For an unknown length of time, he watched the electricity that ran in the hidden wiring between the walls and the ceiling, saw how it fed into the light bulb, the heart monitor and the other equipment that surrounded his bed.

His last sense to come back to him was his common sense as he realised he was tucked into a gurney framed by intensive care equipment. Panicked, he tried to rise, but when he instinctively went to lean on his right hand to do so, he fell sideways, nearly crashing into the equipment.

He looked to his arm and found the space empty, electrical signals running to his elbow as his brain commanded it to move and finding a dead end. As he stared at the confusing signals, his last memories came back to him. “AL!”

A shuffling sounded down the corridor and two voices had a small altercation before Granny hobbled into the room. “Alphonse is fine,” she said, straight to the point. “You, however, need to calm down before you damage yourself further.”

“Granny? What’s going on, is Al okay? He, he, is he…?” He tried to communicate his questions without putting words to them, without admitting that what had happened was real. He needed answers, but he didn’t want the ones he knew he would get.

“I already said Alphonse is fine,” Granny said, calm as ever with no room for protest. She wasn’t putting words to it either, but he had his answers in the space after the sentence where the unsaid hung out in the open. “You are not. You’re missing an arm and a leg.”

“... and a leg?” he looked down to the lower half of his body and he didn’t need to see his network to know that he was missing the better half of his left leg, the flatbed sheet was enough.

“The arm was singed, there was barely anything left of it other than bones when Alphonse got you here, and the leg was crushed. I had to amputate it,” Granny sighed and turned to the various monitors beside his bed, checking things that he didn’t have the names for.

“But you can make me new ones,” he said firmly, letting the shock of the situation wash over him and tuck itself into the back of his mind. Maybe it would resurface later. He didn’t care. It didn’t feel real.

“That’s not a conversation to be had right after life-saving surgery,” she said and drew herself away from the equipment.

“You can,” Edward persisted and Granny’s face hardened. But it wasn’t cruel or harsh, her expression was serious.

“Many people rather deal with the loss of limbs without replacement,” she said and Edward knew it to be true, but he wasn’t ‘many people’. ‘Many people’ didn’t sense electricity and turn their brothers into machines. The thought almost choked him before he retreated into the surreal reality of _this doesn’t feel real_.

“I’m not many people,” he told her as much and Granny said nothing, just staring at him hard with her arms crossed for several seconds.

“We’ll talk more later,” she conceded eventually. “This next dose of painkiller is going to make you drowsy,” she finished and walked out of the room. The same voice from earlier piped up again, too far away for Edward to hear, followed by more footsteps that slowly faded out.

It wasn’t a no but Edward wasn’t foolish enough to think that it was a yes. He couldn’t think much of anything as the drowsiness that Granny had talked about started to kick in just as she promised, gently pulling him into sleep. Just as he had woken up, the last of his senses to leave him was the unnamed sense that picked up on the energy around and within him.

* * *

Ed knew the Colonel had arrived before he ‘saw’ him. The moment he entered Resembool, Ed knew. Ed knew because, while ambient energy ran through all things and every human had electrical messengers running through their nerves, Colonel Roy Mustang was alive with it.

Initially, it had scared Ed. Bedbound and with nothing else to do, his brother swamped with underserved guilt and Winry consumed by her new job as Granny’s assistant, he’d attempted to navigate this new world that had been opened up to him.

Before, he’d manipulated electricity with tools and machines. Rubber coated wires had formed circuits that he’d painstakingly soldered together had now been replaced when his palms touched and he completed his own circuit. Ill. That was how he felt. Ill at how the horrible practise he’d used to ruin his brother and destroy his own life was now ingrained in his bones. He didn’t want to have anything to do with it ever again yet it had everything to do with him.

Ed hadn’t encountered anyone with the same buzz within them that he and Al had. Al, for quite obviously depressing reasons, was brimming with energy and Ed was always aware of him, even when he left Ed’s bedside to sit outside in the rain in a futile attempt to feel the water sluicing down his helmet. Raining as it was now, Ed could pinpoint his location down to the exact porch floorboard he stood on and he wouldn’t even need his new sense to be sure that he was there.

The colonel was another anomaly and the reason for his existence as an outlier became clear when he entered the house. His companion, Lt. Hawkeye, absent of the buzz. Clean cut military blue marked him for what he was and the subtle wiring worked into the fabric was damning. He was a Manipulator, which wasn’t a crime in and of itself. Ed and Al had been Manipulators. Teacher was a Manipulator. But Teacher would spit at the colonel’s metal-capped boots if he knocked on her door and that made all the difference.

By chance or because he spotted the colonel’s approach, Al retreated inside, his thudding footsteps heralding his entrance several paces before he was visible. Silent if not for the clumsy movements of his new body, he took his place behind Ed’s wheelchair, a looming protector. Protecting him from what, Ed didn’t know. He’d rather Al didn’t bother and instead let him be taken by whatever evil he was on the lookout for.

The colonel did not warn them of his arrival like Al did, however unintentional, and stormed into the house, ignoring Granny’s protests. Ed didn’t see the dark look on his face, the downright murderous glint in his eyes, shocked and appalled. Ed kept his eyes down as he had been doing most of the time, staring at nothing in particular, blind to everything in the world aside from the energy, keeping his mind away from the cruel reality he’d created for himself and his brother with his own two hands, the absent counterpart a physical reminder.

The grip around his collar was both expected while also coming as a surprise, his mind aware of the colonel’s movements yet not quite connecting the energy that permeated his body with the body itself and its impact on the physical world. Without words, he was lifted from his seat, forced to see the colonel with his eyes, the crushing weight of his guilt choking his vocal cords as he was shunted into the real world.

Al, perhaps because he didn’t have vocal cords like his that could be choked, or maybe because he was stronger than Ed, or because he wasn’t the one responsible for this mess, placed a metal hand on the colonel’s arm and spoke when Ed couldn’t.

The day ended with an invitation to recruitment and a renewed ‘fire’ within Ed. The colonel took Ed’s failure, his attempt, and transformed it into a display of unheard of talent while maintaining the terror of his actions. He was young, he was bright, he could _make things better_. No one had heard of a human conscience transference on this level. Al was unique, a testament to the insanity of what they’d been able to do, and he was so incredibly illegal. Nothing like this had even been touched since the android revolution so many years ago.

If he was able to do that once, panic fueled and missing limbs, what could he do with proper research and a budget? Could he transfer it again? Create a new body for Al, a more _human_ body, and transfer him over once more?

If there was one way to atone for his sins, it wouldn’t be that. But it was as close as he could possibly get.

* * *

The arm and leg felt… strange. Given a marker, he could map out the routes his nerves took as they carried information from his brain to the metal appendages and trail his finger along the lines to demonstrate the journeys the signals made. Yet the response was lacking. Grannie assured him that was normal, in fact, what Ed could already do in such a short amount of time was astonishing. Yet, Ed could see it all, how it worked. He had an advantage over every other… _cyborg_ around. Surely, he should be up and running just like he used to before he hunkered down in the basement and committed the sin that required these modifications. He couldn’t help but feel inadequate. He should be doing more. Joining the military already. Fixing Al.

“Hey, brother… why don’t we spar? Grannie always says practice makes perfect.”

“Sure, Al, but don’t cry when I beat you!”

“Hah, you can try!”

* * *

Fuhrer Bradley glowed with energy and he was kind of hard to look at. Not that a little sense blindness ever stopped Ed when he was dead set on a plan.

* * *

Brow gently tucked into a thoughtful crease, Bradley made an aborted move to tap the fountain pen against his lip before he remembered himself and the ink on its tip, eyes trailing across the neatly typed words on the certification before him. There was no real need for him to take such care with it, he could process the text much quicker if he wanted to. But he didn’t want to, he wanted to slide his gaze from left to right as his secretary did with the reports and his wife when she read Selim a bedtime story.

He reached the end of the passage at a sedate pace and dipped his pen into the inkpot. While he couldn’t feel the way the tip scratched against the dry well, he could certainly hear it, and frowned at the dried black bottom of the jar. He’d left it out for too long. Nevermind, he had a spare in the right desk drawer.

With a thought for the future, he wrote a short note about the shortage for his secretary in penmanship was near perfect but intentionally drew the ascenders just a little too low with every third ‘f’ and the stems too long on every fourth ‘B’. He then wet the nib again and drew his signature on the certificate. He quite liked his signature, it had been born from hours of hard work, analysing the flicks and loops and making minor alterations until the result looked authentic. Like with his penmanship, he always changed something small with each iteration, this time choosing to make the upper bowl of the ‘B’ larger by a millimetre radius.

There, the certificate was ready. The recipient, someone who he would be sure to keep a hypothetical ‘eye on’, had piqued his interest before, during and after his demonstration at the state alchemist exam. First, he was twelve. Second, he had created a circuit without any resources and used the resulting energy to produce a weapon which he had then thrust towards Bradley's face. Third, he was Edward Elric, and there wasn’t much else further than that to know.

Father had already been informed and Bradley awaited his response while he did other, more important things, like run the country.

* * *

They couldn’t produce a fire hot enough to burn the house to the ground completely. There were lots of elements involved, different materials and compositions. Especially the basement, where the contents had been designed to be fire-resistant. Short of setting off a bomb, there hadn’t been much else they could do. Except manipulate.

“I could mess with the electrons on an atomic level,” Ed suggested offhandedly, not taking his eyes off the roaring house fire. For all that it wouldn’t erase their past, it was doing a pretty good job. Anyhow, it was cheating to just get rid of it completely. Something of the truth had to be left behind. Had to remain real.

“That sounds like a terrible idea,” Al said, also watching the fire. His form was glowing in Ed’s peripheral, orange, yellow and red dancing across his metallic body in one mesmerising evermoving blend.

“Yeah, would take a lot of energy, anyway, and I don’t want to blow out the whole of Resembool, Grannie hates blackouts.”

“I think anyone older than four hates blackouts.”

“Hey, I like blackouts. Everything gets quiet. And it’s exciting. We get to use candles.”

Al said nothing and that seemed to say an awful lot. Ed would have risen to it, but then something popped within the house and the sound drew his attention back to the matter at hand. He was no longer in a laughing mood.

* * *

There were rumours of a man in Leto who was bringing people back to life through the power of God. It’s stupid, so incredibly stupid. There’s no way that someone is reviving the dead through the power of ‘Leto’, a sun God of all things. However, Mustang, the Colonel was a whole lot less cool in person than he had been in their brief correspondences between the ultimate taboo and joining the military, hadn’t had anything else for them up until now.

Al said he ought to cut the bastard some slack after everything he’s done for them but Ed just pointed out that the only thing he’d done for them so far was help them break Teacher’s promise. Al said something about extenuating circumstances or something or other. Ed blocked it out, mind already set.

So, they were in the desert, Al periodically sinking into the dunes and Ed’s artificial limbs sizzling as grains of sand wormed their way into the inner workings of the metal, hit the power and melted into glass. Fortunately, not much had gotten that far, but he knew that Winry would freak out when they inevitably returned. Although, he was more worried about Al, who insisted that he was fine but, well, Ed was his older brother and it worrying was in the job description.

When they finally reached the city and basked in the deep groundwater that the fountain was pumping, he had to stop to examine the absurdity of the place. The buildings were mostly normal, a little outdated, old satellite dishes adorned some of the overhangs and he could feel the lack of energy in some of the houses, which was incredibly odd. But it all made sense once a civilian explained how Leto had come away from the android revolution in shambles, having become one of the last outposts before the droids were completely eradicated. No one had wanted to touch Leto and Ed maintained a vigilance over his arm and leg, making sure they were covered at all times.

For all that it irked him, the assumptions people made about his brother, identifying him as the Fullmetal Manipulator, only helped solidify that his metal shell was an eccentrism and hid the truth quite well. He even fixed the radio - a goddamn radio in this day and age! - that he broke, and the civilians knew too little about manipulators to notice that he’d used himself as a power source rather than the power banks that most military personnel carried.

Then… then there was Rose. And Edward looked her, dead in the eye, and told her that dead people stayed dead, told her that while his brother stood by his side, and he didn’t waver. He maintained that belief even as bullets ricocheted off his brother’s metal torso and his helmet flew to reveal an intricate mess of circuitry beneath his neck. Because Al hadn’t really died, he’d just moved on, but their mother, that thing they’d made for her, that had never been alive to begin with.

“Shit,” Ed swore as Cornello’s chimera bounded towards him, bloody murder dancing in its eyes. Chimeras were legal on a technicality - the joining of lives and the artificial was perfectly acceptable as long as the sentience wasn’t human. They were practically on par with cyborgs, just for different reasons. Chimeras were distasteful because they were the products of animal experimentation. Cyborgs were distasteful because they brushed too close to android experimentation. Both seemed to lose their respective natures in the eyes of some.

Case in point, the horror that took over Rose’s delicate features when the chimera bit down on reinforced aluminium and he was forced to reveal that there wasn’t a scrap of humanity left between the Elric brothers. Not that Cornello seemed to care, taking out a glistening red orb that practically blinded Ed’s senses, the energy inside of it so immense that he staggered back.

At that moment, he knew he needed one of, one of whatever the hell that was. No one could generate the insurmountable energy that had been so hard-packed into that red _thing_. Possibilities that he’d dismissed for their energy consumption rose to the forefront of his mind even as he and Al made their getaway.

The potentials and previously unthought probabilities still swam in his mind when they exposed Cornello for the fraud he was. Even as the town turned against them. Even more so as Cornello transformed his arm into a mess of mass destruction with its aid and ultimately wrought his own self-destruction. Even as he told Rose to keep walking, knowing inside that the words weren’t just for her as his gaze latched onto the horizon and they left the chaos of the desert town that had been Lior.

* * *

As previously established, Ed couldn’t deny a tenuous kinship between himself and chimeras. Which meant that he both pitied and hated them and would fight them but couldn’t stand the reflection in their pained eyes.

Shou Tucker was a State Manipulator who forcibly took parts of animals and fused them together with the power of twisted technology. It wasn’t Ed’s place to say that it was wrong given his own state of existence and the weight of his past actions that rendered Tucker’s doings as light as a handful of pebbles. But it unnerved him. And he didn’t like feeling their energies beneath the house.

Nina and her stupid dog were a welcome distraction. As the battling urges to charge down and snuff out the power that held the animals together and the want to run away clashed in his mind, he just had to ‘bump into’ Nina and help her out with whatever drawing or writing she was doing and the desperate needs would be quelled. He was supposed to be researching and he really was, but he’d go insane without the breaks and there was never anyone there to chastise him for how he regulated his workflow. Never had been.

And maybe he could admit that Alexander wasn’t a stupid dog, as well. He saw cunning in those eyes. The way he jumped on Ed was strategic. He’d sized up Al, taken on Ed, saw Nina’s reactions, found that there were no repercussions and capitalised on Ed’s stature. No, on Alexander’s stature. Ed wasn’t small, the dog was just too big.

Focusing on Alexander was good. He was how animals were supposed to feel. Not warring foreign energies barely held together by clinical non-living electricity. It wasn’t like Ed and his limbs, where his nervous system worked together with the prosthesis. Tucker’s tech regulated the chimera’s, channelling electricity from the implants to keep everything in order. Very delicate work. Genius, if depraved.

And he’d gotten his certification on the account that he had produced one that could talk. Ed didn’t know the precise details and wasn’t sure he’d want to know, really, but without the use of a human subject, that implied some sort of artificial intelligence, or artificially enhanced intelligence, which was dicey at best. Honestly, Ed was surprised it had been allowed. But, then again, it wasn’t outright AI and the military clearly saw some sort of merit in the advancement.

Two of the chimeras beneath his feet had gotten out of their cages and seemed to be fighting, ripping Ed from his musings. He put the book he was reading down and took several measured breaths in hopes of shaking the uneasy feeling from his bones.

“Brother?” Al perked up, turning his scanning eyes away from the book he’d been rapidly running through. Cheh, Ed almost envied him for the speed he could take in information but he also supposed that Al ought to at least have some sort of bonus or advantage after coming out from what he had been through, it was only fair. He also seemed to be unfairly attuned to Ed’s state of mind, pattern recognition working to file away all of his ticks and tells, which Ed was envious of. Al was much more difficult to read, but he got by. Meanwhile, Al just had to look at the crease of Ed’s eyes or whatever and he knew exactly what was going on in the melting pot of emotions that he housed inside of his head.

“Nothing much, Al,” Ed waved him, not bothering to deny it but not willing to delve deeper into the subject. “I want to go for a walk, get a lay of the land, you know? Really memorise the streets and the alleyways - you never know when you need a good escape route.”

“Yeah, sounds good,” Al said as if he didn’t have a digitised map formed of every step they had ever taken anywhere tucked neatly inside his CPU. He was humouring him but, hey, Ed would take what he could get so long as it was advantageous to him.

* * *

He knew something was wrong the moment the Tucker Manor was within range of his sensor ability.

The usual barrage of twisted energies hit him first and he winced, as per usual. By the time they got to the gates, he’d managed to parse them from one another, which was a personal record that he would have celebrated internally if it weren’t for what the task had gleaned.

Nina and Alexander were close. Closer than normal. Intertwined. Foreign wires weaving them together. Ed was sick right there and then.

* * *

Somebody killed Nina and Alexander. If he were honest with himself, he wasn’t confident that he could have split them, given the chance. When Winry painstakingly detached and reattached his limbs when they got particularly messed up, his body and the prosthesis weren’t whole things by themselves. Parts of him were in the limbs and his body was riddled with wires where the ports made the connections between nerves and tech. Once, they had been three separate items. Now, if he found a way to fix himself organically, which he had no doubt he wouldn’t despite Al’s insistence, he still wouldn’t be completely himself. The tech was ingrained into his body, the scar tissue would remain and the extensive surgery required to remove the ports would leave him pockmarked with holes.

The Bastard Colonel spewed fire from his hands. He clicked and produced an ignition, a starter for the flames. But the rest of it was highly regulated via complicated means that adjusted the angle, mass, direction and longevity of the flames as well as countless other variables. He had circuits running through his clothes for the sake of subtlety, not wanting to carry around a mass of metal and wiring like other military manipulators who liked to intimidate with their visible machinery. He was sure the Bastard would call it class but, in truth, the Bastard was just a Sly Bastard and didn’t like to have his cards on show. Ed knew he’d been experimenting with taking it further, there were dead wires broken up in his arm sometimes and Ed didn’t even want to think about what the doctors made of that. Because he had to be seeing some kind of health professional because the wires changed or sometimes they weren’t there at all. But the passages would remain, he knew.

The damage to his body as well. If he was successful in his endeavour, the Bastard would never be able to take the enhancements back. Just like how he’d have to destroy his clothes if he wanted to take out the carefully woven wires.

Armstrong enhanced his strength, capping his fists with horned metal gloves that Ed admired for the aesthetic if not the crude misshapen array of pistons and cogs beneath that sensed his motion threw force with his punches. Armstrong could take his modifications on and off. They weren’t invariably connected like Ed and his limbs, the Bastard’s clothes and his wires, Al and his everything. Nina and Alexander. He hadn’t crossed that particular line and manipulators didn’t need to. Shouldn’t, really.

Nina and Alexander had become inseparable but Ed would have performed the impossible if he had to, and Al would have been with him all the way. But he’d never been granted the chance.

Somebody killed Nina and Alexander.

* * *

Not all military men were good men. Hell, Ed already knew that before he enlisted, if only in a vague second-hand sense, the information picked up from Teacher’s rants when he and Al contemplated possible career paths for Manipulators and the State Manipulator programme inevitably came up in conversation. Military men dealt in war. That, too, Ed only knew in passing, never having lived through war on the front lines. Far removed as Resembol was, they weren’t as drastically hit unlike the border cities and towns, but Winry’s loss had been enough to learn from.

Then Tucker happened and he got a taste of what went on, up close and personal.

So, it made sense that, in a world where people hurt and got hurt, someone would take issue. Revenge was a common plotline in the penny books Al picked up from time to time, always going for the physical books rather than the digital downloads so that he could take the time to scan rather than intake all of the data at once. But Ed hadn’t considered it as an element that could weave itself into his own life, before Nina. Sure, if he ever saw his dad again, he’d kick him into next Tuesday, but he wasn’t actively seeking to destroy him. Things were different now. If he found the person who had done… _that_ to Nina, the _that_ that had happened after Tucker had done the other _that_ , he wasn’t sure what he would do but it would probably constitute as revenge. Possibly, it would also constitute as bloody murder. Depended on whether Al was there when it happened, otherwise, he might have to allow the culprit a small mercy and turn them in.

Although, he definitely hadn’t considered the idea that he’d be the target of someone else’s revenge. When the infamous hand of Scar came close to eviscerating him, he’d stared at the circuits inlaid beneath his skin and the electricity that ran through them and wondered _why_ and his contemplation got no further.

Sheer destruction had disassembled his arm. His inorganic arm, thankfully. Whatever computer system inhabited Scar’s arm had the ability to scan and recognise the structure of whatever it came into contact with and near-instantly deliver an exacting amount of pulsing electricity in a blindingly bright and fast sequence. The system, he guessed absently as he was looked over by a worried onsite medic who’d started tending to him despite his protests that he was fine and just required a mechanic’s touch (an understatement, Winry was going to need to make a whole new arm and he just knew the future hammer induced lump on his head wouldn’t go down for weeks after the appointment), had trouble moving on from one thing to the other.

‘Thing’ wasn’t a very technical term. Yet Ed didn’t have anything else that was applicable while there were too many unknowns at play. The system had faltered when it moved on from cyborg-component to flesh and the arm hadn’t been completely destroyed, either. His continued life was all thanks to a technical fault in the code of the man’s arm. It felt incomplete. Like a work in progress. A prototype. Like the genius behind the creation had stopped working on it just as the product became barely serviceable. But, why? Scar was still alive. He could still work on it. Couldn’t his mysterious revenge plot take the backseat while he got his algorithms in order. It’d be more efficient that way.

“Sometimes, I don’t immediately identify referents,” Al said when Ed brought it up over lunch in the military mess. He hadn’t wanted to eat there, too many ogling eyes, and the automatic settings of the oven must have been just a degree too high on the heating because the fries always came out a little too crispy and he wasn’t allowed to just them. They were key code locked and Al could work it but he didn’t want to use Al for something like that when Al wouldn’t also get to enjoy the spoils of the reward. So he picked up the potato slices from the preservation chamber just like everyone else and slid it into the cooker just like everyone else and ate too-crispy-fries just like everyone else, alongside his main meal.

“Immediately, so that’s a, what, zero point zero zero zero zero zero zero zero-” Ed started to chant.

“Oh, shut up, Ed,” Al tried, fruitlessly.

“- Zero zero zero zero zero zero zero zero zero zero zero zero one second delay?” He finished with a raised eyebrow and got a resigned chuckle from Al, as intended.

“Thanks,” he said, deadpan, “but what I meant it, my… you know… isn’t perfect, but it gets the job done,” he skipped the word ‘code’. Ed relied on the pretence that they didn’t broach the subject because of the potential prying ears. Hughes had a habit of making veiled comments about bugs and whatnot. It had taken Ed a day or so to hear what he said between the lines of his daughter enthused speeches, and he still didn’t catch all of it, but, from what he had gathered, everyone was always trying to get the upper hand on everyone. In a military saturated with tech aficionados, spying on your colleagues had never been easier. Detecting said spying had never been easier, either.

“I guess, but I’d still make sure it was finished, it’s not like he has to go on the hunt _right now_ , he didn’t look _that_ old despite the hair thing,” Ed spoke into his hamburger, glowering at the fries as he did so. The burger went into a different oven and it was the only one attuned to the correct settings that he had encountered in his minimal trips to the mess. If it weren’t for the order for Ed and Al to stay within military grounds while the heavy-duty non-manipulators dealt with Scar, he wouldn’t have had to deal with too-crispy-fries.

“Of course you would, brother, you’re a perfectionist, even if your ideas of perfection include hideous decorations,” Al said cheerily and, if he paid attention to his tone alone, Ed could have thought that he was being nice, complementary perhaps. But Ed knew his brother better than that.

“Gargoyles are fucking gorgeous,” he said and flung a chip square at Al’s face. Predictably, Al caught it in a blink-and-you-miss movement. Maybe if Ed’s prosthesis wasn’t out of commission, the hit might have landed. 

“You keep telling yourself that, brother.”

* * *

There were other reasons behind why Ed didn’t like to hang around at HQ more than he needed to. Hell, he didn’t even stick around for as long as he was supposed to. He gave his reports to the Bastard and he scarpered. Bad food was just a minor infraction on a long list of factors that pushed him to hop onto the early monorails when he was handed his field mission files. The Bastard had no way of knowing the real, more pressing reasons as Ed wasn’t about to blurt out his deep set fears to a man he knew could and would use them to gain leverage if need be. He was sly like that. Sleezy. Ed would say he couldn’t trust the Bastard as far as he could throw him, except, Ed could haul a lot of weight and his throw was pretty damn decent, with or without cybernetic help. So the point was moot. Maybe he could say that he didn’t trust him as far as… Havoc could throw him. Or no, Fuery. Havoc was freakishly tall and probably had some sort of hidden muscle in that lanky figure of his beneath the military blues. Fuery was a safer bet.

One reason was that the place buzzed like no other, second to only the laboratories. Headaches unfailing loomed on the horizon after six hours in the main building and would develop into fully blown migraines if left unchecked. 

Another reason was that, sometimes, he’d catch a flicker of something in the corner of his vision, particularly at night. But Al didn’t. And it was gone as soon as it came. So. Yeah. Creepy.

Also, Bradley was all consuming. Ed had no idea what kind of manipulation circuits he had going on despite how he was supposed to be a non-manipulator but whatever it was, it was eye catching in the way that simultaneously made Ed want to take him apart while it also warded him away because it looked like a mess. Ed enjoyed puzzles, liked figuring out intricate circuitry while Al had a proficiency for code, but he also had good taste. That particular puzzle did not look refined and Ed could already imagine the hairs he’d lose to his pulling hands if he encountered all the ways it could be streamlined yet hadn’t been, cursing out whoever had produced it - Bradley, the Fuhrer. 

Al often accused Ed of having no self preservation instinct. Ed would not deny that he certainly got into more scrapes than most, but he knew where to draw a line. The rules would be different if the Fuhrer did something, but, so far, he’d just employed him and let Mustang issue him wild goose chases halfway across the country. And gave him a pretty damn decent research expenditure budget. His continued good graces, if they could be called that, in the Fuehrer's books were something to be upheld and maintained. 

That did not make his stay at HQ any more pleasant. Having access to his track record, the inevitability in which he and Al snook off should have been accounted for. Ed didn’t take responsibility for other people’s oversights. Sometimes he rectified the mistakes that lay in wake of those oversights or took advantage of them - see Yoki and, well, now for examples - but he didn’t adapt his own behaviour to the benefit of others when they really could have easily made their own accommodations. 

Al hot on his heels with worried reprimands, Ed snook underneath the loose watch of the guards through the means of a little self-defenestration and took to the streets for a splash of fresh air. 

But then it started raining, thick and oily unlike any of the rainfall in Resembol and the more removed towns he’d visited in his travels, and he wanted to melt away with it, for a moment. A couple of errant drops slipped into his mouth with the taste of rust and red things that shouldn’t taint sky water and he couldn’t help but miss the brief reprieve he’d had when he’d been grouching about too-crispy-fries and referents and serial killers. 

“We never saw… her, did we?” He asked Al, at some point they’d made it into the town streets and away from the buzzing headache that was Central’s military cluster, legs on autopilot and Al a comforting presence by his side. 

Despite what Havoc liked to claim, he and Al weren’t telepathic. “What do you mean, brother?”

“Don’t make me spell it out,” he griped, or maybe he pleaded, “the alley way, they said it happened in an alleyway. We never saw what it looked like, when she…”

“It’ll be washed away now,” Al said dully, a tone Ed recognised as when he pulled away his emotions and leaned on the basics of the programming behind his synthetic voice, “or contaminated,” he brought his hand to his eye level, scanning the rain water that had gathered into fat rivulets on the downward turn of his fingers. 

“We could, no, _you_ could look, see more than I could, anyway,” Ed shrugged and tried to play it off as nonchalant, like it didn’t matter to him that he'd be pretty useless in a situation reliant on forensics. He was a manipulator and, sure, there was that one manipulator with the gloves that smoothed over any surface and gave a breakdown of what he was touching down to the molecular level, but most manipulators had specialisations and they weren’t useful in every situation. Except, Ed was a jack of all trades, used his body as a circuit, his brain as a CPU and transformed the world around him. But his work was backed by his theoretical knowledge and he hadn’t touched forensic science before. Maybe he would, after this. 

“Will you be a little less… gloomy, if I do?” al asked, tentatively, emotions filtering back into his voice, thank God. 

“I mean, it won’t be nice but, I have some theories that I’d like to confirm.”

* * *

Revenge was a dish best served cold. Hah. The Bastard hadn’t been the one that Ed had learnt that phrase from - he’d actually nicked it from one of Al’s stories - but he’d definitely say it, given the opportunity. 

Ed wouldn’t. Revenge was hot and angry and iron on his tongue, melding together into something hot and spicy that rendered the edges of his vision red. Ed had had theories and now he had confirmed them. Al said he was jumping to conclusions, but Al said that in a monotone voice devoid of inflexion. 

From the pattern of the blood splatter, and a bunch of other factors that must have zipped through Al’s brain at the speed of light, Al had noted that there was a fractional delay between the destruction of the organic components that had belonged to dog and girl. The mechanical intrusions had been taken away if they’d survived, which Ed was pretty sure they had, but Ed didn’t need them to come to his conclusion. Scar had killed Nina, it was an irrefutable fact. 

“Ed, Ed,” Al said and there was an inkling in the back of Ed’s mind that suggested that he’d been repeating the same syllable over and over for some time now, exasperated and likely just as drained as Ed was. “Ed, you’re soaked through, we’re not supposed to be here, your arm is in pieces, Scar is hiding, we can’t do anything.”

Yeah. They couldn’t. Ed seethed for a moment, closed his eyes, felt the shivers that had been wracking his bones for a while now and recognised the need for him to take a shower and rid his skin of the filthy acid rain, and took a breath. “Yeah, let’s get back before the Bastard does anything stupid when he realises that we aren’t where he left us.”

* * *

They go home to Resembool. They bump into a doctor who Al remarks, later inside the relative privacy of a monorail carriage, has the tells of a manipulator that Ed refutes since he doesn’t have the real tells of a manipulator that makes them so easily distinguished to Ed’s senses. He did hand them a note, though, something to look up in the central library database. Winry throws a hammer at Ed’s head. Armstrong is there and Ed grimaces at both his proclivity for stripping and messy circuitry. Robust, Al said. Ro _busted_ , Ed had said back and his brother had sighed. 

It was, it wasn’t abnormal. It was the new normal even since Ed had joined the military. But then, Al faltered and _glitched_. He paused as they were about to get ready to leave and made a few jerky aborted motions that jumped in sync with Ed’s sudden erratic heart beat. 

“Al?”

“I’ve been… Central Library Connection Terminated,” Ed could almost hear the underscores in between the robotic words. “Sorry,” Al said belatedly, “give me a minute.” 

Fortunately, Armstrong was outside with Den. As if having the very same thought as Ed did in that moment, Granny left to stall him. Ed would, but he couldn’t leave his brother’s side either. Wasn’t sure if he could move at all, feet routed to the spot, just next to Al, hands hovering uselessy. It sounded like Al was crashing. He didn’t know what to do if Al crashed. 

“Ha, ha, I thought I was going to blue-screen,” Al finally said after a period of time that could have been thirty seconds just as easily as it could have been fifteen minutes. His voice was still a little fragmented, a little inhuman. He was so glad Winry hadn’t been present to begin with and that Granny had left, for Al’s sake. He didn’t like it when he slipped in front of others, as rarely as he did. 

“What, what happened?” Ed said. Central Library? He knew Al had some kind of connection to the databanks. It wasn’t a high level connection, those were monitored and had firewalls that were harder to sneak around or break without notice. Al had various connections, hopping from terminal to terminal, planting shells and deleting log files as he went. Ed didn’t know the details because Al didn’t like to talk about it. 

“My connection to the Central Library database was terminated but I wasn’t detected. Something happened on their end,” with each word, Al’s speech became more and more natural, “It’s almost as if it’s… gone, not deleted but, well, deleted yes, but only at the end. I killed the connection because there was… something on the other side.”

“Something? Like a person messing with things or like a virus?” Ed liked to play down his knowledge of programming. It wasn’t hard, since he hadn’t so much as touched the topic ever since he did what he did to Al. The knowledge never really left him but it took a bit of conscious effort to reach due to its position locked up in the deep recesses of his mind. He could look at the lines of a few programming languages and understand what they were doing but there were many programming languages, old and new, and he hadn’t bothered to learn any more than he had already learnt by the time he had turned eleven. Ed worked with hardware and it suited him just fine. Al was there to pick up what he lacked in software, which worked very well for the two of them. He didn’t need to learn any more programming languages, there was no point when Al was just so much better than him at coding anyway. 

“I’d almost say both,” Al gave a nervous chuckle and scratched the back of his head. A learned gesture, he didn’t do that before. “But that’s crazy, right?”

“Right,” Ed frowned. 

Was it? There wasn’t much known about the Revolution, it happened about four hundred years ago. Ed only knew so much because of Al’s ability to worm himself into databases he couldn't see. That, and the files in the ancient computers in Dad’s basement, long gone now. What was known was that it supposedly started in Xerxes, that the singularity had been reached and the first sentient android had gone berserk. It then moved on to pass along his sentience to other androids and a very long war followed. Apparently, Xerxes hadn’t been a desert city, originally, and Xing should have been a lot easier to reach today. Every last android had been destroyed and artificial intelligence was severely limited in the legal reaches of its growth. The data wars had followed. 

The archives had taken a couple decade long trips through hell and back so no one really knew what had happened after the singularity, not for sure. Left behind were taboos and fears and prejudices that were ingrained in society. Ed felt them keenly with how Granny’s business had to be so far out in the middle of nowhere and that her customers traveled from far away places. There was a place called Rush Valley that was in a sense cut off from the surrounding villages and towns by its location but journey was harder and less inconspicuous for most. 

In Ed’s opinion, the weirdest part about the whole ordeal was how soldiers sometimes would rather cut their service short than get replacements for the body parts they lost. The military shouldn’t care about that sort of thing. Or maybe it should have cared even more, considering that they were the combatant power opposing anyone who should wish to reinstate history. Either way, it was weird. Ed didn’t like it. 

Because of the damage from the wars and following hush hush shutter that fell over the topic, it was hard to know for sure that the facts were right. Could there have been androids left behind? Could someone have gained access to schematics and made new ones? Had a manipulator run rogue with an illegal AI? Ed had sort of mixed all three of those possibilities into one when he made Al’s current state a reality. Except Al was human. He was. 

But if he had done it, surely someone else in the last four hundred years could have as well. And, if he had gone undetected to the extent that he hadn’t been shackled and locked away with Al destroyed, then surely someone else could too, who hadn’t been a desperate eleven year old crying after his mother. 

It was something to think about. Although, the loss of Central Library was something bigger to think about. 

“... that doctor,” Ed said, remembering the note. “We should go see what’s left of the library,” he finished resolutely.

* * *

Internally, Al was grateful that Ed’s attention had been redirected. The probability in which Ed successfully exacted his revenge against Scar had not been in his favour. The exact number was 0.32, 1 being absolute success which was of course never a possibility in any situation that had not already occured. That number could easily change as Al gathered more data and their timeline progressed. The number was decreasing incrementally with each second that went by and the likelihood of Scar having scarpered grew higher in the negative feedback loop between the two figures. 

Al liked the library too. It was the largest database that he’d connected to and he’d been idly downloading its entire collection. He didn’t know the bounds of his memory, not like how he acutely knew the limit of his RAM. But he reasoned he could always just delete the unnecessary carpentry manuals and histories of the mundane if he needed to free up some space. So far, he had felt like there was an empty gaping hole within him that he’d needed to fill up. Downloading the entirety of the first few levels of Central Library had made a difference and he hadn’t had the chance to even get through 73% before he had to kill the connection. 

He really had been afraid that he was going to blue screen. Well, not blue screen per say, he didn’t have a screen, but he felt his cooling system work doubly hard and the active processes piled up on each other until he almost reached the maximum capacity of what he was able to run. Whatever it was that had ransacked the library, it had attempted to overload him with useless commands that did nothing but aid in the attempt to kill him. 

The chance that Central Library had been destroyed by that same process was 0.73. His personal rule was that anything over 0.7 was worth pursuing. Of course, there were other variables that came into play, mainly the risk of Ed’s life and his own continued existence. But this didn’t involve either of those variables because he was calculating the probability of something that had already happened, he just needed the confirmation to raise those digits to 1. 

Al had been scared because the probability of a full system crash had been incredibly close to 1 in those moments before he activated the kill switch. He hadn’t ever crashed before. In theory, computers often recovered from crashes with minimal damages. In fact, it was common practice among those who liked to undervolt their systems to test the limits of the core voltage offset and determine the highest bound when the computer crashed. 

Al didn’t even want to consider the idea that that was something applicable to him. 

Crashing sounded like dying for a little bit. Kind of like a coma. Unintentional comas caused an array of complications, not always, but enough for him to instil fear within him. No matter if the probability that he’d come out of a crash exactly as he had gone in was 0.99, he’d avoid that possibility at any cost. He was scared. And he wanted to make sure that the thing that had done that couldn’t come for him next.

* * *

Sunlight glanced off the great glass panes that adorned the front of Central Library. Like all major buildings in Central, it was a blending of cultures, the old cream refurbished architecture accented by modern finishings that gleamed in an understated fashion to allow for the regality of the original foundations to take centre stage. If it weren’t for Al’s knowledge, it would have appeared that nothing had changed. Except for the shimmering projected blue tape that cordoned off the entrance and warded citizens away. 

Ed had no compunctions about blue tape and following the rules so long as he was confident to get away with breaking them, which he was. Old architecture meant old ventilation systems unlike the modern air flow pipes that were powered by artificially generated winds. Those didn’t allow for people who were completely normally sized like Ed to shimmy through and commit athletic feats of breaking-and-entering like he was doing now. 

Clapping to complete the circuit, he altered the magnetic field ever so slightly and the screws of the ventilation grid sped towards his metal arm and the grid itself would have rattled if he hadn’t been using his feet to still it. Once the process was complete, he removed the grid and slipped down into the small storage closet. He could sense that there were no people in the next room but the room after that would be tricky. 

Two people, one of middling height and the other tall, were bent over something, presumably a table, probably discussing whatever had transpired. Then the taller one stood up to his full height and walked around the room, which made things difficult. Ed wasn’t all that good at identifying the differences between the front and back of a person. He could sense the direction the shorter person was facing because his body was angled in a way that would be incredibly uncomfortable if bent backwards. But he had no clue for the other guy. He’d have to rely on his eyes, or a distraction. 

Placing his arms together gently so as to not make a sound with his clapping, he created the circuit and then placed his open palms against the wall in the second room, only a door between him and the two people. The wires for the lights intersected with the lights for this room, which was an odd decision but not uncommon, just meant that they could be turned on and off from the switch that was in this room as well. He redirected the current to the circuit he had created within himself.

The effect was immediate, on both ends. The light blew out in their room and the two occupants got up, hummed and harred for a minute, before leaving, presumably to find either someone who knew what to do about the lights or a room in which the lights were working. Meanwhile, Ed could feel the surplus of electricity in his body and the hairs on his one biological arm rose in tandem with… the hair on his head. He jumped back the moment the men left, coincidentally just before the tingling grew to an unbearable irritation that he knew from prior experience testing his limits would only grow until he essentially short circuited himself. An increase of electricity in an never ending circuit designed to contain could only handle so much without an outlet before the circuit broke and he hurt himself. 

“Al _cannot_ see this,” he grumbled as he frantically patted down his hair. It was still frizzy as all hell but the least he could do was wrestle it back into a somewhat neat plait and reintroduce it to the concept of gravity. 

Obstacles now removed from his path, he slipped through the empty room, down another corridor, hid behind a set of shelves when another person made a turn right into his path, slipped by undetected and finally reached the back entrance. He couldn’t overpower the lock on the door like he had with the lights but he could open the little window above the frame, take Al’s detached arm when he handed it to him and place the fingers against the lock and let Al decode the lock by abusing the emergency escape clause. A click sounded, the door opened and Al took his liberated arm back and slotted it back into his elbow joint. Silence rang out for a few moments as Al stared at Ed and Ed stared at Al. 

“What?” Ed challenged, hands on his hips. 

“Nothing,” Al replied in a tone that was just a tad too cheery to be innocently happy. He started down the corridor and moved past Ed, only stopping when he didn’t follow. “Come on, brother, I can’t detect people like you can.”

With an aborted movement to pat down his hair again, Ed took the lead and threw a suspicious look at Al when they passed each other. Last time Ed’s hair had been like this, well, not like this but more in its initial stages when it poofed out completely since Al had been spotting him when he had carried out the limit tests, Al had likened him to a pomeranian dog. Naturally, Ed had instigated a spontaneous spar and, of course, Al had beat him, because Al was the one person in the world that Ed had encountered so far that he had no hope of winning against in close combat. Aside from maybe Teacher, and it had been years since they had fought and Ed wasn’t eager to repeat the experience. He wasn’t eager in general at the prospect of meeting with Teacher again, actually, which made guilt churn in his gut that he didn’t attempt to quell because he knew he was entirely deserving of it. 

The journey from the back of the building on the ground floor to the floor below basement level would be a lot more complicated than entering the building in the first place. Both floors were teeming with military personnel, as was expected when the entire library database got wiped clean like that and then screwed up beyond recognition. Fortunately, they didn’t need Al to get into direct contact with the servers, he just needed a terminal that had seen the action. So, any of the numerous computers that dotted the building. 

Closing his eyes to allow himself to place more focus on his own personal brand of the sixth sense, Ed mapped out the building in as much detail as he could before anything more than a light headache could assault his brain. He followed the lines of electricity until he found not just a computer but a computer in an ideal secluded location with minimal chances of the users, he and Al, being ambushed or accidentally walked in on.

He found one such computer in one of the store rooms. Upon arriving, Al identified its primary purpose as keeping an itinerary of the physical counterparts to the virtual library. Furniture, mostly, but also tablets, food, staff uniforms, maintenance tools and other things that, while Ed was sure were vital to the continuing function of the library, he didn’t care much about. He slumped, resigned to elevating his mild headache to a thumping drum of a migraine in order to map out the building again but perked up again when Al explained that it was still connected to the servers so it would work just as well as any of the public use terminals.

“This is… vicious,” Al said after a few moments, his fingers on the now open desktop of the computer. His voice had gone slightly tinny in the way it always did when he was concentrating on something that took up most of his processing capacity, taking away from other processes such as the modulations on his synthetic voice. “Whatever did this was either very angry or was really enjoying itself.”

“It? So you think it’s a rogue AI or something?” Ed commented. He’d taken to sitting on one of the filing cabinets with his legs crossed while Al did his work, keeping an almost absent ‘eye’ on the energy signatures around them. 

“... I don’t want to jump to conclusions,” Al said and took his hand away from the computer, his voice jumping back to completely natural halfway through the world ‘conclusions’. The transition used to be jarring for Ed to hear, but he’d grown used to it with time and exposure. “But it’s nothing like any of the viruses I’ve encountered before… and I’ve had to put down a lot of those before, with all the servers I connect to.”

“What?!” Ed exclaimed, jumping from his perch on the filing cabinet and standing before Al, hands gripping his metal arms. “You’ve been attacked by viruses before? When?!”

“It’s okay brother, it wasn’t anything I couldn’t handle,” Al tried to brush him off but he didn’t move, letting Ed grasp onto him and have his moment. 

“But, but viruses are the only form of attack that you’re actually susceptible to! What if you crashed because you encountered one that you couldn’t handle?” Under his metal hand, he could tell that he was warping Al’s arm, but only realised when the sound of metal under pressure rang in his ears. As though he had been burnt, he jumped back, “Sorry.”

“It’s okay and I’m not invincible Ed, viruses aren’t the only things that can hurt me, but my defenses are really good, trust me on this, okay?” He said and poked at the dents Ed had made, balancing them out until the surface was mostly smooth. 

“It’s okay Ed you can trust me,” Ed mimicked his voice, “actually, things other than viruses can also hurt me, see, brother, it’s all equally dangerous,” he dropped the act, “that’s not reassuring!”

“Brother, stop,” Al sighed, “I need you to trust me, okay? Viruses are everywhere. Even in Central Library before this,” he gestured vaguely in the direction of the itinerary logging computer, “there were viruses, ones that people would accidentally bring with them from their home computers or ones that were downloaded intentionally. Computers can’t avoid coming into contact with them, even if they have all the best firewalls in the world, they still have to kill them. I’m…” he trailed off and looked away. “ _I’m_ a computer, brother, the rules are the same for me.”

Ed didn’t know what to say to that. On a logical level, Ed was aware that his brother’s body was made of metal and rubber and all sorts of little interconnecting bits and pieces housed inside intimidating armour but that was his body. There was no organic tissues interlaced between the wires, nothing soft and fleshy aside from the occasional rubber coating. Inside of it was Al he just… he just processed things differently from other people. 

“And I’m a cyborg,” Ed settled on with a resolute nod. “Hey, people have shit down pacemakers before haven’t they? Virtually, I mean, hands off and away at some other computer or whatever. Reckon someone could do that to my arm and leg? It’s not entirely mechanical after all, there’s ones and zeros in there somewhere, right?” He thrust his arm towards Al and motioned for him to examine it. 

Al didn’t examine it, he just gently pushed Ed’s arm back over to him. “Yeah, I helped Winry and Granny with the simulations while you were talking with Armstrong, it was fun,” Al said and Ed could hear the smile in his tone. 

“So could I?” Ed continued. 

“It would be pretty difficult, since it’s quite self contained, it’d be like hacking a microwave, the hacker would have to have direct access to your arm or leg in order to plant anything, so they wouldn’t get the chance,” Al explained.

“Damn right they wouldn’t,” Ed said righteously. His and Al’s status was a well guarded secret. His attacker would first have to acquire the knowledge that he even had any code rattling around in his body and then sneak up on Ed unawares. Fat chance of that happened, Ed’s reflexes got him into accidental trouble more often than not when outside of fights and even then he had his brother as back up. Nothing could get past the both of them working together. “But, what I meant was, I’m susceptible to viruses too, then, so we’re not that different,” he shrugged it off, trying his best to project that it wasn’t a big deal, “oh and so, I guess I can’t get on your back about it then, since that would make me a hypocrite.”

After a moment, Al spoke, “thanks, brother.”

“Whatever,” Ed shrugged and turned his attention back to his sensing. They had gotten what they came for. It was time to figure out what the hell was going and why the hell everything was so hush hush about it. Maybe it was time to pay the Bastard a visit. He hadn’t assigned them anything useful in a while.

* * *

“Armstrong has returned, sir,” Riza reported, face stoic as per usual, but Roy swore he could see the tendrils of her vindictive sense of humour in her expression. Perhaps in the corners of the flat line of her mouth or hidden behind the colour of her irises. Or maybe he just had a good sense for it. Either way, he knew he wasn’t going to like what she said next. 

“Just Armstrong?” He said and reclined on his desk chair. Yes, this was going to be annoying. Fullmetal was supposed to have returned with Armstrong and while Roy had no doubt that he had made it back to Central, he was supposed to report to Roy as soon as he returned. Not that Roy had expected him to when considering his track record but he had hoped that he might have matured after the attack and his close brush with death. But, no, that would be too optimistic, wouldn’t it. 

“Just Armstrong, sir,” Riza confirmed and Roy sighed. 

Then the door swung open and in came the Fullmetal Manipulator swinging, his respectful brother close behind and apologising profusely for the intrusion. Apologising to Riza more than to Roy, he noted, but apologising nonetheless. 

Fullmetal was more or less on time and, while logic dictated that he should be grateful for this, a niggling feeling in the back of his head suggested otherwise. 

Roy sighed, again.

**Author's Note:**

> Phew, this is the last big bang I'm doing for a while. This did not come as easily to me as the last two big bangs I did. You should really check out my partners art (gonna link here when it's posted) because its fuckin awesome!! 
> 
> I'll be hitting this up with some more editing later as I'm pretty sure I will have missed some mistakes and wonky wording, as I tend to do, but the summer heat is effin hot and I needed to whack this out. 
> 
> Check out the big bang collection to see more awesome FMA fics!!


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